Archive for December, 2009

Goal #78 is to come up with my own food journal. I say “my own” because I have tried a few in the past, most recently the Weight Watchers version. I didn’t like any of them. Aside from the problem with any food journal (that you have to actually write down all you eat, lol), for some reason they just didn’t keep me motivated. I had purchased the WW 3 month journal and I think it was a little overwhelming. It’s small in size but thick. The thought of filling the whole thing up was a bit much. Also, because it is small, there is not room to write much besides the name of the food and the points value. I think I might want to write a little more, like my mood at the time of eating and what I am doing at that time too.

Every time I go to the library I stop at the featured books and just do a little browse. The last time I was there I found a book called The Daily Fix by Alexa Fishback, MS, RD. It’s mainly geared toward the working out of the home woman, but I found a bit that I could apply a lot of the information to myself. The biggest thing was her ideas for a food journal. I am going to try it, it seems to incorporate everything that I want. She suggests a five column format with a column each for time, food/drink, portion, calories, and notes. Everyday you journal what you ate, when, how much, and what you were doing/feeling at the time.

Then she takes it one step further. Apparently there is a common dietary assessment tool called the Food Frequency Questionnaire (FFQ). I had never heard of it before. The point is to analyze your eating over the week for any food types that you might not get enough of or getting too much of. It’s basically a recap of the food you ate so you can see on one page what you ate too much of or not enough of. With all of my other journals I always looked at each day individually. I like the idea of looking over a longer period of time for trends. To me it seems better to analyze a total behavior rather than a behavior for a day.

I have found a new composition notebook (I love those things!) and will be starting my journal today. My refined goal for #78 will now be to keep a food journal for 1 complete week. Somehow I think now is when the real work on this goal starts, lol.

Every month I am going to post the family financial goals. Ideally they will line up with my 101 goals, but this is the first month and I’m still retraining my brain to think that way.

Cash flow D’s smog check on the Tahoe. We are really unsure if it will pass or not, so this could be a really easy goal to attain, or could end up requiring a lot more thought.

Keep within our Christmas budget. This should be easy enough as we are totally on cash envelopes. Which leads me to our next goal…

Keep detailed track of where and how much we spend from our envelopes. We have been doing a lot of stealing from one envelope to pay for something from another category because that envelope is empty. It makes it very hard to review the budget. So this month we are writing down everything.

Eat at home all month. This is always very hard for me. I tend to get a little princess-y and not want to cook in the evenings. I am trying out some new-to-me tricks that I will post about later.

Put something (anything) into the Emergency Fund. I have tweaked the budget a little and so far it looks like we will be able to deposit $39. Not good. Which again, leads me to the next goal…

Try to come up with $100 of random, extra money. We have cans that need to be recycled and change that needs to be rolled, as well as I’m expecting a couple of $15 rebates.